How To Ask The Right Questions, To Make The Right Hire

Asking the right questions relies heavily on a technique called Socratic questioning, or what has sometimes been called the Colombo approach.

Like the famous detective Colombo it requires the interviewer to act dumb and ask open probing questions to enable the interviewee to provide as much information as possible. How the interviewee responds and what they decide to tell you will provide you with as much information about them as what they actually say. Interviewees that can provide specific, short answers and evidence their experience with quality examples are likely to be much better than candidates who ramble aimlessly and talk in general terms.

Asking the right questions depends upon knowing what types of questions to ask and when, I have prepared a detailed overview of question types to help you make the right hire and will discuss these now. A good interviewer will aim to enable the interviewee to talk for approximately 65% of the interview. This is important because you need to find out as much information from the interviewee in the short amount of time you have with them. To enable you to do this use open questions designed to give the interviewee plenty of scope to talk.

Example Open Questions

- Tell me about your current role

- Tell me about your team leading experience

- How did you go about dealing with difficult customers?

Closed Questions

Try to avoid closed questions, which are designed to ensure a specific response. Whilst these can be useful for verifying qualifications or checking exact experience levels, they will quickly stifle discussion if used to excess.

Example Closed Questions

- Are you James Turner?

- Do you have a degree?

Avoid Leading Questions

Leading questions rarely have a place in an interview because more often that not they are based upon imposing the interviewers stereotypes and values structure upon the interviewee. They are also confrontational and are demeaning to the interviewee and may quickly lead to a formal complaint being lodged or offer grounds for appeal under anti discrimination legislation.

Example Leading Questions

- I presume you applied for this position because you’re unhappy with your current employer.

- You are not really experienced enough for this job are you?

- As a female I presume you will be taking time off to have a baby

Ask for Specific Examples.

The key skills that differentiates a good interviewer from a great one is the ability to encourage and extract specific examples that evidence the skills of the interviewee. Whilst it may be beneficial to ask an interviewee what they did in their last job it is much better to ask more specific questions that evidence skills required for doing the doing.

For example if you are looking for an IT project manager the key skills to do the job may include
the following:

- Ability to plan and co-ordinate

- Ability to delegate

- Line management skills

- Use of appropriate project management software

So why not ask specific questions around these core skills, for example

- Can you tell me about a time when you had to manage a project, what did you do?

- Can you tell me about a time when you were responsible for managing staff, what happened?

- Tell me about a time when you had to manage a complex project, what did you do?

Summary

How to ask the right questions to make the right hire is easy when you understand the different types of questions and how to use them effectively. Try to illicit specific examples from interviewees that evidence their experiences, after all you want to satisfy yourself that they are capable of doing the job and what better way to do this than them demonstrating how they have done this

By: J Dawkins

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